Low and mighty

On AI, God, and porn

I’ve written a bit here about AI, most recently on the ersatz “actress” Tilly Norwood that some weird techbros tried promoting. On this subject I try to say more than eww gross because, while I don’t feel any attraction to AI slop myself, I know that there’s more going on among those who do feel it than being too dumb to resist what The System tells them to like, and I think it’s worth pinning down.

For one thing, polls show a lot of people do resist AI. They may be responding to questions about risks vs. benefits (like will it steal their jobs, just like the evil supervillains who produce it promise), but since I think most Americans aren’t totally depraved (though I can’t prove it) I assume they recognize the connection between the world-spoiling technology that threatens their jobs and society in general and those butt-ugly slop pictures that keep popping up on their computers. I mean they hear enough about it!

The thing is, I’m convinced that most people know that AI is not reality or an expression thereof, like art — it is rather an expression of something else that its admirers desire, like a will to power. I got into this a little bit in my essay on AI and fash aesthetics — how there’s something in the brute force of the rendering engines that create the force-fed, over-enriched imagery of AI slop that appeals to MAGA folks and makes them accept the product even if it doesn’t appeal to their tastes in the same way music and movies and TV do.

(And I think that helps to explain somewhat its appeal for the MAGA chieftains who would use AI to manipulate voters — they’re culture warriors who resent the way real art affects voters’ emotions, and hope this new monstrosity machine will be the thing that destroys its power at last.)

I saw a few items in the news recently that reminded me of this. First, a hilarious but also kind of chilling story in Wired about Sam, a guy who, seeking to make money, generated some scantily-clad AI women — and got nowhere until, he says, a Google chatbot told him “the conservative audience (especially older men in the US) often has higher disposable income and is more loyal,” and he decided to make his fake girl MAGA-friendly:

So last January, Sam created Emily Hart, a registered nurse and Jennifer Lawrence look-alike. On an Instagram account for Emily, @emily_hart.nurse, Sam posted photos of her ice fishing, drinking Coors Light, and shooting off a few rounds at the rifle range, with emoji-laden captions like “If you want a reason to unfollow: Christ is king, abortion is murder, and all illegals must be deported,” and “POV: You were assigned intelligent at birth, but you identify as liberal <clown emoji>”...

“Every Reel I posted was getting 3 million views, 5 million views, 10 million views. The algorithm loved it.” he claims. Within a month, [his creation] Emily Hart had more than 10,000 Instagram followers, many of whom also subscribed to her softcore AI-generated content on the OnlyFans competitor Fanvue. And between Fanvue subscriptions and selling MAGA-themed T-shirts (one sample message reads ”PTSD: Pretty Tired of Stupid Democrats”), Sam estimates he was making a few thousand dollars a month.

Here are some pics of Emily Hart here — sorry, no nudes! (Though Sam says he has some, and they’re very popular.) Other MAGA-chick avatars are discussed, including one who does feet pics; some intellectuals speculate on the phenomenon, e.g., “even among some digital natives, there’s a perspective of, ‘Well, I don’t actually care if this is true. I like the sentiment of it.’” Sam, who claims he tried hawking a liberal version and got nowhere, says, “the MAGA crowd is made up of dumb people — like, super dumb people. And they fall for it.”

Both Sam and the intellectual have a point but I’d go further. The tradition of pornography — including softcore variants like pin-up girls — goes back to way before the dawn of photography, yet the invention of photography hasn’t totally supplanted non-photo porn such as hentai, “tits and lizards” fare a la Heavy Metal, Phoebe Zeitgeist etc. Clearly people aren’t looking at those because they can’t get ahold of photos — there’s something about their creativity, the dimensions of desire added by the artists, that adds to their appeal.

AI slop porn is... not that. Look up “AI slop porn” on Google if you dare. Its grotesqueries have a similar texture to other types of AI slop. But, given that PornHub and a thousand variants exist, it’s even harder to see why someone would go for the AI instead — if you really need your sex object to reflect your political beliefs, can’t you just employ the leap of imagination with which porn users transfer themselves into the scenarios they’re viewing?

Apparently they can’t. It would appear that fans of the MAGA pin-ups have achieved something I thought unimaginable: They have actually managed to debase pornography with politics. I mean, as a stupid male I have certainly objectified and fantasized about women in my time, but never once do I recall thinking, instead of “I bet she’d really like me,” that “I bet she’d really like mass deportation” (or, for that matter, universal basic income).

At the other end of the spectrum — but in a way, not — we have this trailer up top for a new Noah’s Ark movie with a heavy Bible-banger quality in which one of the destined-to-die sinners tells Noah, played by Kevin Sorbo, that he’s a good person, and Noah responds, “being good and being righteous are two different things.” Screw you, “empathy” libtards! As in The Passion of the Christ, everyone outside the saved is damned, and the hero doesn’t have to soil his hands with them because God does the killing for him.

All par for the course, but in this movie not only the big settings — a busy ancient city, huge idols, and of course the flood — but also even relatively simple bits like raindrops falling on cracked earth and a storm a-brewin’ are done entirely in AI. In fact at one point in the trailer I saw some actors talking in front of a plain wall and thought it might be from a different movie — it looked too much like reality.

Maybe some people will want grandeur in their Bible story badly enough that they’ll take the bland AI version of it. Me, I just got the old slop feeling as vista after vista flashed by with no distinguishing features, no stone or plant or doorway that the human eye might notice in its singularity as it does in life. One of the sadder artifacts is a quick sequence in which Noah’s flock are in a giant AI manger that houses the two-of-everything, trying to settle a giant crocodile that rages and snaps. That seems like something that would look cool in real life — but it too is AI and it doesn’t even look lifelike; it looks rather like it was made out of clay, but without any Ray Harryhausen brio in its animation.

The trailer gives an impression of the power, not of the story or of nature or of great beasts like the croc, but of the machine that made them. Maybe that’s appropriate for the godly folks who’ll be pre-sold on it — come to think of it, AI is very like a god, and may be said to play his role in the picture. But this god seems to lack most of the attributes of the Great Architect most of us know, who made Leviathan and the lilies of the field and all the wonders of this world that delight the senses. All this god has is power — and maybe that’s the real point.